From 10p to 3.5p: what a text costs in the UK

In February 2021, Ofcom's pricing team went through the operators' websites and wrote down what a text cost on a traditional pay-as-you-go SIM. Three: 10p. Giffgaff: 10p. EE: 15p. Virgin Mobile's starter tariff: 15p. The table is in Ofcom's 2021 pricing trends report, and it reads like a price list from a different decade, because for most people it is. The same report notes that by March 2021 Three was "the only MNO that still offered new customers a traditional pre-pay service", and that it had just put its prices up.

Now look at the other end of the market. The government's own sending service, GOV.UK Notify, charges 2.4p plus VAT per text. A business buying a pack from us pays between 5p and 3.5p plus VAT depending on the size of the pack. So a text costs 10p and 3.5p at the same time, in the same country. Ofcom's revenue figures explain how, and they also show what a business is paying for when it buys texts by the thousand.

When people paid per text

Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2014 has a chart (figure 5.40) that splits mobile retail revenue into four pots: access and bundled services, out-of-bundle calls, out-of-bundle data and out-of-bundle messaging. The messaging pot is the money people paid for texts beyond whatever their tariff included, and in 2008 it was £2.8 billion. It drifted down to £2.7 billion in 2009, £2.6 billion in 2010, £2.5 billion in 2011 and £2.4 billion in 2012, then fell off a cliff: £1.8 billion in 2013, a drop Ofcom put at 24.6% in one year and called "the main driver of falling total retail mobile revenues".

That cliff wasn't people texting less. Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2017 gives the volumes: 150 billion SMS and MMS messages in 2011, 151 billion in 2012, and only then a decline, to 129 billion in 2013, 110 billion in 2014, 102 billion in 2015 and 96 billion in 2016 (we went through that series in how many texts the UK still sends). Revenue fell by a quarter in a year when volumes fell by about a seventh. What changed was who paid per text. The 2012 report had already spotted it: "Messaging volumes increased in 2011; the fall in messaging revenues shows a marked fall in revenue per message, which is related to the availability of tariffs that include large numbers of inclusive messages." The 2014 report added that the migration of pre-pay customers onto contracts was pushing access and bundle revenue up (to £7.8 billion in 2013) while out-of-bundle revenue of every kind fell.

Ofcom's 2018 pricing report measures the same shift from the tariff side. By July 2017, 83% of pay-monthly tariffs came with unlimited texts, up from 37% in 2013. Once texts are unlimited, the price of one text to the person sending it is nothing, and the "10p a text" figure only survives on the dwindling tariffs where usage is still deducted from a credit balance.

The long tail of paying per text

Ofcom's quarterly Telecommunications Market Data Updates carry the same pot forward, in £ millions, in a column headed "SMS and MMS" that sits next to a separate column for access and bundled services. In 2017 it was £645 million. Then £607 million, £567 million, £496 million, and £440 million in both 2021 and 2022. It was £424 million in 2023, £435 million in 2024 and £406 million in 2025.

Two things stand out. The first is how flat the last five years are: around £400 million to £440 million a year, for texts outside an allowance, while the number of messages sent kept falling (78.78 billion in 2017, 21.51 billion in 2025, and the last quarter of 2025 down 26.5% on a year earlier, to 4.96 billion). Ofcom's 2021 pricing report saw the same thing in its basket of average use, which it rebuilds each year: between 2019 and 2020 it recorded "a 25% fall in use of SMS messaging" alongside a 33% rise in data use. The second follows from the first. Divide the revenue by the messages and you get an odd result: about 0.8p of out-of-bundle revenue per message sent in 2017 and about 1.9p in 2025. The people still paying per text are a smaller group paying more each, which is what you'd expect from Ofcom's 2021 note about Three's "significant price increases for all its pre-pay customers" from 16 February 2021, and from the 15p EE figure in the same table.

That's the consumer side. None of those figures include the text a dentist or a delivery firm sends you, because that traffic is bought by the business, in bulk, from a different kind of supplier, and the price is set by a different market.

What a business pays

The best public benchmark is GOV.UK Notify, because it publishes its price in plain text with a date on it. On the page as updated on 1 April 2026: "A single, 160-character text message costs 2.4 pence (plus VAT)." Before that price applies there's a free allowance per service each financial year, 20,000 texts for central government departments, 10,000 for local authorities, 5,000 for schools and other organisations, and nothing for GP surgeries. The allowance renews on 1 April and unused texts expire on 31 March. Notify sends for public bodies only, so a business can't use it, but 2.4p is a fair marker of what the public sector pays at national scale.

Commercial providers price in a range around that. On 16 October 2026 we read the UK pricing of six of them for our comparison pages. The SMS Works advertised "from 3.1 pence plus VAT" per UK text. ClickSend's one readable pence figure was "from £0.0424 per message". FireText's page offered 500 credits for £25, which is 5p a text. Esendex and Voodoo SMS both sold monthly plans at £54 for 500 messages, £143 for 2,500 and £468 for 10,000, which works out at 10.8p, 5.7p and 4.7p a message, with lower rates mentioned for contracts or volume ("from 2.3p" at Esendex, "from 1.74p" at Voodoo SMS) that you have to ask about. TextMagic priced in dollars, at $0.049 a text at every volume. Prices change, so treat those as a snapshot with a date on it.

Our own prices are the four packs on the pricing page: 500 credits for £25, 2,000 for £90, 5,000 for £200 and 20,000 for £700, all plus VAT, which is 5p, 4.5p, 4p and 3.5p a text. Every new account starts with 10 free credits, and credits don't expire.

So the honest answer to "what does a business text cost" in late 2026 is: between about 2.4p and 5p plus VAT, depending on who you buy from and how many you buy, with the lowest figures reserved for the public sector or for contracts you have to ask about. Add VAT and 3.5p becomes 4.2p, and Notify's 2.4p becomes 2.88p.

What you're paying for

A per-text price only means something if you know what counts as one text, and here every provider follows the same rule, because the rule comes from the SMS standard. Notify's pricing page sets it out: a message of up to 160 characters, spaces included, is one text; up to 306 characters is two, up to 459 is three, and so on. If the message contains a character outside the basic GSM set (Notify gives Welsh, Arabic and Mandarin as examples; a curly apostrophe or an emoji does the same), the limits drop to 70 characters for one text and 134 for two. A handful of symbols count double: Notify lists the square and curly brackets, the caret, backslash, pipe, tilde and the euro sign.

In CaptiFi Connect the same rule applies and the unit is a credit: one credit is one part to a UK mobile, 160 characters in GSM-7 or 70 in Unicode, and a longer text splits into parts of 153 or 67 characters. The SMS character limit guide explains why the parts are shorter than the first message, and the character counter shows you the count as you type.

The practical consequence is that the headline price is a price per 160 characters, and a reminder that runs to 170 costs twice what one that stops at 158 does. A business sending 1,000 reminders a month at 3.5p pays £35 if they fit in one part and £70 if they don't. Ten characters trimmed off a template can halve the bill for that text.

A few other things sit outside the per-text price and are worth checking on any price list: whether replies cost anything (with us they're free, and they land in the two-way inbox), whether a dedicated number is extra (ours is 250 credits a month, about £10, and shared numbers are free), whether sender names, keywords or link tracking are add-ons, and what happens to a text that fails, which differs by provider and which the delivery reports page describes for ours.

The sum for your own business

Take a hair salon sending 400 appointment reminders a month, each under 160 characters, with a Reply C to confirm. On the 2,000-credit pack that's 400 × 4.5p, or £18 a month plus VAT, and the pack lasts five months. On the 20,000 pack it's £14. A dental practice doing 2,000 recalls a month is at £70 on the largest pack. The same salon on a £54-a-month 500-message plan from one of the providers above would pay three times as much for the same texts, and the same practice would need the £143 plan.

Against that, the 10p the person on the other end would have paid to send a text back in 2021 looks like a different product, and in a sense it is. The consumer price is for one person sending one message, on a tariff designed to push them towards a bundle. The business price is for sending at scale through a route built for it. Ofcom's figures show the consumer version shrinking to £406 million a year across the whole country. The business version is where the texts you receive from organisations come from, and it costs the sender between 2.4p and 5p each.